Earlier tonight, our 2025 judge Kit Fan announced the winning poems in our 2025 Open Poetry Competition. Here is Kit’s report:
Poetry can’t live without competing with itself. In a poem, each word exposes the risk of deselection and each line bears the mark of the survival of the fittest. It’s a high-risk, dog-eat-dog art form obsessed with Darwinian successes. To succeed, a poem doubts itself at every turn, a double-agent serving two masters named Sound and Form. A poem wins because it understands failure is part and parcel of its volatile existence.
Poets, like most human beings, are not very good at winning or losing. It’s hard to live in black and white when our retinas embrace all colours. While poets subscribe to the spirit of competition, it is the poems who compete. Imagine a race when 1370 poems perch at the starting point waiting for the gunshot.
What a judge can do in such a race is to observe the movement and coordination, to gauge how gravity and grace collaborate or not in this act of chaos we call creativity. Ultimately, alongside the contestants, the judge is also being judged. Poetry is an unforgiving art: it’s difficult, marginal, and hand-to-mouth. We love it for its difficulty, marginality, and non-commerciality. In the end, the only prize for poetry is the poem.
First prize: ‘Oblivious’ by Sharon Black
The poem plays out glimpses of mortal threats with unyielding precision and reticence. There is wit in referring back and forth to the act of writing without off-tracking into claustrophobia. The unexpected gear-change of ‘Leave them be. It’s quiet time. / We’ll come back in the morning’ invites a sense of uncertainty and intimacy, enlarging the poem’s circumference. The absence of the first person is a breath of fresh air.
Second prize: ‘The Meeting’ by Ion Corcos
Deceptively straightforward, the poem is unafraid to venture into the seen and unseen, opening a portal to re-evaluate a life with minimal personal details that cut to the chase. What seem clichés at first glance become sources of unrest, destabilising our familiar mortal attributes of chess and ferryman, as though they too are caught up in the house of mirror where a slug and a snail look and find each other through the speaker.
Third prize: ‘she doesn’t like his talk’ by Kay Syrad
The almost-sonnet plays with the instability of colour and expands it towards multiple types of ambiguity – whether it’s a word or species. The erotic tension, bound up with biblical echoes, is handled with wit and care. The same applies to the tug of war between take and return, what’s intact and broken. The poem is taut and self-assured.
Equal Fourth prize: ‘Catalogue of Black Holes’ by Alicia Sometimes
The poem handles the terrifying bodily transformation with a calm, investigative distance which heightens its poignancy. The absence of full-stops is subtly executed, enabling the poem interchanges its scale from skin to universe.
Equal Fourth prize: ‘The Weight of Things’ by Hélène Demetriades
With unfiltered directness like a documentary, the poem records a trauma, while prioritising intimacy and cleanliness over pain and self-indulgence. The fabric of life collides sharply and full-throatedly – yet in such a careful pitch – with the fabric of death, unburdening a deeply felt memory onto page and back into memory.
Equal Fourth prize: ‘Bruisewort’ by mulika ojikutu-harnett
The poem shares a sense of intransigence adjacent to beauty – or is it chance? – of everyday life. It’s big-hearted, non-partisan, and at ease with its eloquence.
Equal Fourth prize: ‘In Praise of Sap’ by Prue Chamberlayne
Keenly observed, with tightly knitted diction that contrasts with the fluidity of sap, the poem investigates nature and its vital juice, while getting our nose close to the ground, to the process of quiet metamorphosis. We wonder what kind of poem it could have been, had the last two lines been reconfigured to something beyond human genetics. Having said that, it’s a question, not an answer that we are after, but what should the reader do if the question leans towards a particular answer?
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Thank you to everyone who entered the competition, and of course to Kit for judging it. Congratulations to the seven winners. We will publish the seven winning poems here over the coming few days, and then in our printed annual Folio, later this year.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 